It’s interesting to note that all this would be largely mediated if Eliezer hadn’t made himself a character in the story. A case for land value tax, easily moveable housing, the value of rationality, his belief in the incompetence of this dimension– all this could have done in a story that doesn’t star Eliezer– and the reader wouldn’t, then, have to deal with the dissonance between the status it looks like Eliezer assigns himself (that of a player from a higher league slumming here) and that which the naive reader of the piece assigns him; so long as the character is not an obvious stand in.
As of now the story is a super stimulus for the improper-status-assignment emotion he recently discovered—which I suppose could be the true prank.
There’s something to learn in Feynman’s writings. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! is a book about how a highly-intelligent man gets by in a world full of fools. And yet the readers never feel like the author thinks they are fools, even though from Feynman’s perspective they almost certainly are.
It’s interesting to note that all this would be largely mediated if Eliezer hadn’t made himself a character in the story. A case for land value tax, easily moveable housing, the value of rationality, his belief in the incompetence of this dimension– all this could have done in a story that doesn’t star Eliezer– and the reader wouldn’t, then, have to deal with the dissonance between the status it looks like Eliezer assigns himself (that of a player from a higher league slumming here) and that which the naive reader of the piece assigns him; so long as the character is not an obvious stand in.
As of now the story is a super stimulus for the improper-status-assignment emotion he recently discovered—which I suppose could be the true prank.
There’s something to learn in Feynman’s writings. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! is a book about how a highly-intelligent man gets by in a world full of fools. And yet the readers never feel like the author thinks they are fools, even though from Feynman’s perspective they almost certainly are.